PDP: Picking Digital Pockets

Funded by:

Academy of Finland

Principal Investigators:

Prof. Dr. Jussi Kangasharju, University of Helsinki

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jörg Ott, Aalto University

Duration of the Project:

01.09.2012 31.08.2015

Mobile devices of people form a new and unexplored data reserve. In an
urban area, terabytes of data are literally walking around in the
pockets of people, who may be happy to share or exchange (trade) their
contents. But no means exists to take advantage of the availability of
this data in the environment: to assess or categorize what is
available, to map data, and facilitate the exchange of
information capabilities readily available in the fixed Internet,
where content is easily indexed and searched for. In the PDP project,
we plan to explore mechanisms for searching and mining these kinds of
data reserves. Striving for developing mechanisms for yet unparalleled
ways of mobile cooperation, we will carefully consider addressing
privacy and related concerns. PDP extends our on-going collaboration
on floating content (FI SHOK) and will focus on gaining fundamental
understanding about the nature of such mobile data reserves and how
their nature affects applications designed to exploit these data
reserves.

PDP is based on ad-hoc node-to-node communication which is paramount for at least two reasons:

Not using a central element for sharing avoids both censorship and
data gathering so that important properties such as anonymity and privacy
can be retained.

Ad-hoc communication allows offloading data from the wireless access links,
thereby aiding in conserving scarce link capacity and supporting operation even
if there is no (affordable) wireless network infrastructure available.

The scientific objectives are providing a fundamental understanding of the feasibility mining
data in mobile devices and characterizing the mutual dependencies of accuracy, latency, and
convergence of views as a function of content dynamics and volume, node mobility, and cost.
Analytical work will yield insights into the elementary bounds when mining such distributed
environment. We will devise a system architecture and a set of algorithms, validate those by
means of extensive simulations, and implement those for experimental validation in realworld
settings.

From a practical application perspective, the ultimate goal is to provide a basis for novel applications
that exploit awareness of their (immediate) environment exploiting opportunistic
communication between mobile devices. To this end, we will implement the PDP platform
and a set of prototype applications for mobile users.

E. Hyytiä, T. Spyropoulos and J. Ott,
Offload (Only) the Right Jobs: Robust Offloading Using the Markov Decision Processes,
in IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM), 2015, Boston, MA, USA.
(Runner-up for the best paper award)(link)